[Discuss] On Backups

[Rich Pieri]

The deduplication discussion got me thinking about how I do backups of
my two "work" stations (read: where I play games, watch movies, and do
all my other not actually work things like writing this). I had been
using rsync to replicate data to my file server (ZFS, redundant
storage, etc.) but this really isn't efficient in total. So I went
looking at what cool options are available. I found a pair of programs
that do what I want:

First is Relax-and-Recover, aka ReaR. It partitions and formats a USB
drive to be a bootable turn-key bare metal recovery device. It's
limited to recovering to identical hardware which is fine for me.
Emergency bare metal recovery is what I want from this aspect of
backups.

Transparency: I have been using ReaR since January because it is bare
metal recovery in a more convenient form than Clonezilla.

Second is restic. This is for file and filesystem recovery. There are
many similar programs: borg, rdiff-backup, etc., but what makes restic
stand out for me is the backups can be mounted as filesystems via FUSE.
Mounting a backup set and browsing it like any filesystem is absolutely
brilliant for restoring files.

My implementation is a bit odd. Or perhaps not. I have a pair of big
SSDs in USB enclosures. Drive A has a ReaR backup of machine A and
restic backups of important files from machine B; drive B has a ReaR
backup of machine B and restic backups of important files from machine
A. This should provide safety in the unlikely case that I lose a
computer and either of the backup devices.

-- 
\m/ (--) \m/